Ever since the election, I’ve been pondering writing a column about the changes that would need to happen to MSD for us to be treating all our people like actual people. It goes much further than removing “excessive sanctions”. Thing is, I’m on a benefit, and I don’t think I can risk it. I haven’t done anything that would justify stopping my payments, but that’s hardly relevant.

In lieu of mine, read Catriona MacLennan’s blog instead. There are several things I would add even to this, but I don’t feel safe talking about them in public. I’d say, buy me a drink and we’ll talk, but that might be construed as financial support.

“One of the signals we use to identify sensitive media is a list of terms that frequently appear alongside adult content. Many of these words on the list are not inherently explicit, which is why they must be used alongside other signals to determine if content is sensitive.

“Our implementation of this list in search allowed Tweets to be categorised based solely on text, without taking other signals into account. Also, the list was out of date, had not been maintained and incorrectly included terms that are primarily used in non-sensitive contexts.”

It doesn’t matter how many times people use the word ‘bisexual’ in searches for porn, it should never be on this kind of list. Yet it’s not the first time a company with huge online influence has made this kind of “mistake”. Again, actual porn was easily accessible, but an LGBT term was not. Again, the erasure was a result of an attempt to ‘protect’ people, to solve a problem not properly understood by the company. Your defaults are not neutral, and neither are your algorithms.

Twitter at least swiftly put up their hand to the mistake. But it was fascinating for me watching the conversations unfold with the bisexual awareness accounts that raised the problem. There are two comments in particular that caught my attention like a broken nail snagging in your tights. I’m not going to name the people who made them, because it doesn’t matter and they don’t need the attention.

One was a dear man who said, “I don’t understand, why are people searching for their sexuality? I’m straight and I’ve never done a search for that.”

Of course you haven’t. You don’t have to. This is part of what you get for being the default: no hashtag. Your sexuality is so prevalent you can’t even see it. Nobody’s ever told you straights don’t exist. You’ve never had to come out. You don’t need to go searching to find people who look like you.

Then there was the person who, appalled at what Twitter had done, said, “It’s not like we’re a fetish!” Reader, my forehead thumped into my wrist-rest just as hard this second time, but for reasons perhaps more difficult to understand.

Here’s the thing everyone who is in some way not the straight-monogamous-vanilla-cissexual default has in common: our sex is somehow more powerful. It’s more dangerous, especially to children, and has to be more tightly controlled. Just walking down the street or going to a work event with your same-sex partner, or multiple partners, is somehow a sexual act. I’ve worked on a site where a same-sex kiss was banned on a PG-13 board, because it was just too damn sexual. Stupid sexy gays. I guess we just have to suck this up, right, because our Identity is Sexual. Not like straight people. They don’t have sexual identities, they just are.

And I know some of you are probably thinking, but kink is different, right? Kink is entirely about sex. It’s what you do, not who you are. How could kink not be sexual?

Here’s a thought experiment. It’s entirely hypothetical, of course, because there’s no way I could currently be in a D/s relationship, because despite it involving no financial support, that’s emotional support and I could lose my benefit if I was doing that. (Being made entirely financially dependent on a new partner could in no way enable relationship abuse, of course, and nobody’s MSD KPIs would give a shit if it did.)

So say, hypothetically, you got up for breakfast with your Dom and then his mum came in and you realised you’d forgotten you were still wearing your collar. I mean, that’s really embarrassing, right? God. So awkward. Imagine if that happened to someone who totally isn’t me.

So how is my collar more sexual than your wedding ring? They both symbolise a physical and emotional relationship. (The linked page is relatively Safe For Work. It contains the word ‘fuck’, but so does this column, now. The site as a whole is incredibly NSFW.) Why shouldn’t it be okay for me to wear my collar in public? It’s not sex.

I have a tattoo on my left arm. It unites a bisexual awareness symbol with a BDSM symbol. I’m always very cautious explaining it when people ask what it means. It’s a tattoo. It’s not sex. (It couldn’t be a vanilla symbol for the same reason it couldn’t be a straight pride symbol: those aren’t things.)

But no, we have to keep our heads down, because what if we polluted your children with our culture of explicit consent, with our nerdy spreadsheets and safety briefings and training sessions? Imagine. Straight vanilla sexual culture is doing such a sterling job of keeping people safe.

Twitter has restored my ability to search for “bisexual” pictures. Thing is, the hashtag is full of hard-core anime porn. Well done.

10 responses to this post

Also the thing that really boggles my mind is the spreadsheets. Totally fine with kids being made aware of and given an understanding differing sexual practices and love, but really - spreadsheets are a step too far!

On a serious note, I actually love PDAs and for some reason acronym PDAs give me even more pleasure.

Yup, this also speaks to people who complain about pride parades or being corrected about your partner's gender, and who claim they're all cool about it, but state, "I don't know why they/you make such a fuss - I don't need to know what goes on in someone's bedroom!"

Often the same people, by the way, who wear wedding rings and constantly refer to "the hubby" and "the wife".

As for the kink-without-sex thing, as another data point, I've done kink with scores of people, the majority of whom I'm not in the slightest bit sexually attracted to. I've had sex with a fraction of that number of people - maybe a tenth. Of that fraction, I've done kink with maybe a quarter of them. So yeah.

Though I take the point that it's often actually used as a block, "I don't need to know about it" is at least on the continuum through "it's none of my business" to the realisation "I don't get to have an opinion about it".

#dangerousemma? #getsoffinmriscanners? Actually, wouldn't that be an expensive kink.

who wear wedding rings and constantly refer to "the hubby" and "the wife"

It's somewhat worse when they regularly have unprompted bitch sessions about their *ex* wife and how .... {eyeroll} and then say "why would gays want marriage? I don't". Yep. And you totally sucking at poker is why we should ban card games, amirite?

There is some amusement for me at living in an area where I am sure polygamy happens more than average (50% Muslim) but polyamory not so much. I am waiting with some trepidation to see what the results of the optional postal survey on who gets to be a bit less unequal say about the suburb. But our rainbow "YES" letterbox has remained undamaged, so that is a somewhat positive sign.

Oh yeah, I am all good with "tolerance", and don't actually require "acceptance", except from people I actually care about, and equal representation in the law.

What I get annoyed by is the manifest hypocrisy in the "I don't care about your bedroom" line in the instance where they themselves are blatantly announcing their own bedroom habits in multiple ways. It's not like I've ever given an acquaintance a blow-by-blow (ahem) rundown on who goes down on whom either.

require "acceptance", except from people I actually care about, and equal representation in the law.

I dunno, at work it would be quite nice if there was any chance of acceptance, but that is down to the individuals I work with. And some of them are not especially tolerant. In a way the "but explain everything to me in great detail because I don't get it" ones are worse, because the whole "I am normal, everyone should be normal, not wanting desperately to be normal in all respects is weird and gross and you owe me an explanation" this is just tedious and annoying. That applies, by the way, to "why do you have chickens? Why don't you just buy eggs at the supermarket like everyone else" level, bob help us all if he worked out that my "new" girlfriend is the same as my "old" girlfriend from before I broke up with my ... uh, "official" girlfriend. In a way so really want to take the whole family along to the work xmas party, just as I want to take roast Erma to work when she meets her tasty end #headsplosion.

Though I take the point that it's often actually used as a block, "I don't need to know about it" is at least on the continuum through "it's none of my business" to the realisation "I don't get to have an opinion about it".

The thing about "I don't need to know about it" is that often it means "please don't interfere with my assumption that you are [default]". If people were assuming ignorance and coding everyone neutral, that would at least be better. But they're not. It's like saying "I don't see colour" when what you mean is "Wherever at all possible I will assume everyone is white". Not talking about it leads to ignoring and erasing diversity.

Sadly the options on that front are not great. I'm rich enough to have a mortgage, but not rich enough to afford anywhere desirable. Lakemba is actually quite tolerant and accepting, there's a lot of quiet-but-strong religious feeling. The thing is that even the most vehement religious bigot here knows that they are going to be first against the wall if there's an(other) outbreak of intolerance. We already have a special division of the NSW Police dedicated to intensive monitoring of Muslims, and regular bullshit that would make the Christians or Jews cry if it were done to them.

But yeah, the overall result for NSW kind of boggled me. That's a hell of a split between Sydney

Yep. Sydney has a lot of migrants. A *lot* of migrants. And they generally run either "WTF" like you mob, or very conservative and "WTF" very much the other way. More of the latter, obviously, especially in western Sydney. Plus there are pockets of evangelical Christians etc, so I'm not hugely surprised.

It amused a lot of people that Tony "failed Catholic priest" Abbott is facing 74% YES in his electorate, that really is going to put pressure on him to vote the public sentiment rather than what passes for his own moral conscience. I think my local Labour MP, on the other hand, is quite likely to vote YES because he's fairly sane and reasonable as right-wing browns go. The Islamic crew don't have a lot of places to take their votes, the Liberals are really on the nose with key sections (Liberal actions towards key places like Lebanon and Iraq are memorable rather than positive, shall we say).

Being in the "own the house but rent out rooms to help pay the mortgage" category I get to see a sample of new locals whenever we need more housemates. being in Lakemba and conveniently located 400m from the Iraqi "not a mosque" Youth Centre and 500m from the Roselands "actually a mosque" Mosque we get more than 50% Muslims. Experience suggests that young Muslim men moving out of home for the first time are, somewhat unbelievably, even worse than white Christian men ditto in terms of housework and behaviour towards women in the house. Flip side, should the nice African women who've just moved in ever get up the nerve to talk to me (we communicate via SMS) I suspect they are actually quite pleasant.

OK, the point is: no boggling, no problems with anything we do here. So far a grand total of one "so, you live with X and... is Y your other wife?" We have a rainbow "YES" letterbox, which may filter out problem housemates or at least help set expectations (and that letterbox has not been damaged during the campaign).

If I move it would be back in Aotearoa. But yeah, jobs in my industry at my pay level are very rare in NZ. So I probably can't afford to do that until I retire/can get my compulsory superannuation savings back out of the system.

Also, Australian politics is worse, much worse than NZ. The Nationals under Brash would fit comfortably into the Labour party here, and be rejected out of hand by the theoretically-similar Liberals on any number of issues. Gay marriage and abortion, for example. Then there's the "native issue".

You have to remember that the arsehole vote in Australia has always been strong. We get a consistent 1% of voting papers with penises drawn on them, don't forget. We make them turn up but we can't make them turn in a valid vote. Referendums fail, almost always, and the "big success" there was ... voting to count Aborigines as human beings. In 1968.

Meanwhile, in parliament an ongoing crisis because the racist bullshit... sorry, "Australian Constitution" explicitly bans anyone with ties to a foreign country from parliament. When 30% of the country was born overseas and another 30% have parents or grandparents who were, that rules out a lot of people. A *lot* of people. The obvious group who aren't caught by that are absolutely unacceptable to most Australians (oh, and we just had the "Uluru Declaration" where the government went to Aborigines and said "get together and come up with a proposal", then when they got it said "hahaha f**k off, we're not giving you any actual power, how about a nice statement of recognition instead"). Ahem. So, masses of first nations people in Parliament because *they* don't have foreign ties... nup.

But undoing that bit of white nationalism requires a referendum to change the constitution... MPs realise that the hate-them-all vote, plus the arsehole vote, plus the "your own petard" vote would make that one a very difficult argument to win. I would struggle to vote for undoing that ugly bit of racism, just because f**k them, you know. Undo all of it or none of it. Start with "we're here on Aboriginal Lands and we're really grateful that they have agreed to recognise us and our law" and move on from there. The "good" news is that there's only about 200 nations to sign treaties with rather than the 500-600 there were when Australia was founded.

Equality... we have heard of it. Doesn't sound that great. A bit UnAustralian, mate.